1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to electronic guitars and more particularly to an electronic toy guitar having a variety of automatic and manually activated features for producing a wide variety of creative musical sounds.
2. The Prior Art
The field of electronic toy guitars is relatively new. The advent of such guitars brings about many new possibilities for children to produce and enjoy music without the necessity of extensive formal training.
One prior art electronic guitar was distributed by Suzuki Corporation USA under the name Unisynth. While the Unisynth incorporates several useful features, it is perceived as overly complex for the target audience, i.e. adolescents, and that complexity has undoubtedly contributed to its lack of success in the marketplace. The Unisynth includes a short string section comprising six strings as on a real guitar and a neck delineating twelve frets, though there are no strings on the neck. Rather, the neck comprises a plurality of touch sensitive actuators. The strings are not acoustic strings; they are actuators, i.e. striking a string generates an electrical pulse proportional to the force with which the string is struck, thereby signaling circuitry inside the body to play the appropriate note.
The Unisynth is playable in several modes, including a manual mode, an auto-chord mode and a demo mode. In the manual mode, the Unisynth is played just like a regular guitar, i.e. by strumming or picking the strings while fingering the appropriate actuators on the neck, which are in the same positions as the strings and frets on the neck of a real guitar, i.e. the Unisynth has six touch sensitive actuators for each fret. In all the modes, repetitive background music is available, the background music consisting of bass accompaniment and one of a plurality of percussion rhythms, the tempo of the background music being adjustable via a control knob on the body of the guitar. Also available in all modes are bass accompaniment and instrument "voice" selections for varying the sounds produced by the strings.
In the auto-chord mode, a chord is selected by fingering the appropriate fret and string position on the neck of the guitar and then strumming the strings on the body of the guitar. That is, the root of the chord is selected by first locating the appropriate fret, whereupon the type of chord, e.g major, minor, 7th, etc., is selected by fingering the appropriate string position on that fret, with the top string position selecting major chords, the next string position minor chords, and so on. It will be apparent, however, that this arrangement requires using the fingers on one hand to choose both the appropriate fret and string position for the desired chord, a task unique to the Unisynth and requiring a high level of manual dexterity, and these are perceived as major drawbacks of the Unisynth. Once a chord is selected, the user may remove his/her hand from the neck of the guitar and the selected chord will continue to play whenever the guitar is strummed, until a new chord is selected by depressing a different actuator on the neck of the guitar.
In the demo mode, the guitar automatically plays the rhythm and bass for the demo song. The user's sole input is to strum the strings, which are automatically tuned to the correct chord. So, as the user strums the strings, he automatically plays the correct chord progression for the demo song. In this mode, the actuators on the neck of the guitar are inoperative--pressing them has no impact on the chord played when the strings are strummed.
The Unisynth also has separate tremolo and mute buttons, each of which is effective in all modes, the former wavering the pitch of the string music, the latter muting the note duration of the tones played by the strings.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide an electronic guitar having a variety of modes and sounds sufficient for maintaining the interest of both adolescents and adults, but which is nevertheless relatively simple to operate and master, even for adolescents.
A further object of the present invention is to provide an electronic guitar having sufficient versatility and quality to both maintain the creative interests of the player and to entertain a listening audience.
Another object of the invention is to provide an electronic guitar having several automatic and manually activated features which interact with a microprocessor inside the body of the guitar to produce a wide variety of musical sound combinations.
It is yet a further object of the invention to provide a toy musical instrument which is easy to play and yet which has real music validity, i.e. is related in many ways to a real guitar, such that the toy guitar also serves as a learning tool for playing a real guitar.